Had an issue where I need to convert the following line, which was uncompressing a zipped, cpiod compressed archive to disk - and this seemed the best.only way to get to the compressed archive contents.
cat NT.pkg/Scripts | gunzip -dc | cpio -i --quiet
Usually I would call this in Apple Script as so (simplified without my path vars etc here):
do shell script "cat NT.pkg/Scripts | gunzip -dc | cpio -i --quiet"
simple? No! Why you may ask?
so, the issue was that gunzip was writing to stdout, as denoted by the -c option...okay so thats fine, then cpio takes input from stdin and does what you tell it. In this case there were two probems:
1) the working directory is not guaranteed, but generally defaults to /
2) cpio being called in this way was unable to write to / but also gave no errors, instead it seemed to complete successfully (without any files being written)
the answer was to firstly change working directory when calling out the shell script from the Apple Script (which you have to do each call out), here I change it to the location/folder from where the script is run, (bit of a pain but got there in the end), like so:
tell application "Finder" to get folder of (path to me) as Unicode text
set workingDir to POSIX path of result
to test:
set wd to do shell script "cd " & workingDir & ";" & "echo `pwd`"
display dialog wd
or another way to test:
do shell script "cd " & workingDir & ";" & "echo `pwd` > test.txt"
then the key was really splitting the gunzip and cpio processing into two steps, as having tried quite a while, I couldn't get it to work piping from gunzip to cpio via an AppleScript do shell script call out:
do shell script "cd " & workingDir & ";" & "cat " & quoted form of scriptsFile & " | gunzip -dc > tmpScriptsRaw.bin"
do shell script "cd " & workingDir & ";" & "cpio -i --quiet < tmpScriptsRaw.bin"
and there you have it!
Will also upload to my Github Gist so you will also find it there...
Peace.
